Thomas Hoover - Project Cyclops

"Please, give me a break. If you worked for me, I'd fire you on the spot." It was clear she meant every word. "So after you screwed that up, what was I supposed to do? I had no choice but to get on the radio. Now look at the mess we're in. What happened?"

"To tell you the truth," Vance answered, "I'm not even quite sure myself."

"Great. Just great."

"It's a jungle out there."

"No kidding."

"Later. I'll tell all," he said lamely, wanting desperately to change the subject. "Right now, though, there's the matter of Ramirez. And by the way, it is him. We had a one-on-one."

"What did he tell you?" Armont asked, his interest suddenly alive. "Did he say what he wanted out of all this? Ransom or what?"

"We didn't make it that far. A personality conflict got in the way."

"No hint? Nothing?"

"Just that he knows exactly what he's doing. They're going to launch an atomic bomb. Kill a lot of people somewhere. And I don't think the payment of ransom is going to make them call it off. They're going to take the money, then go ahead and do it anyway." He rubbed a hand across his face, trying to feel a cut, then drew it away and examined the blood in the half-light, not quite sure what he was seeing. "But I still think that if we take him out, the rest of them will fold." He looked at Cally, trying to meet the outraged glare she was bestowing on him. "Any idea where he is now?"

'The last I knew, he was in Launch," she said, still visibly fuming.

“Then I guess that's the first objective."

"Jesus, do you want to go in shooting?" She looked around at the motley men of ARM. “Those are my people in there, you know, my friends. It could be a bloodbath."

"Doesn't have to be." Spiros had pulled back his balaclava and was shaking Vance's hand with an air of genuine contrition. Maybe trying to cheer him up after Cally Andros's blast. "Michael, I'm damned sorry about all this. The whole thing is my fault, really."

"Spilt milk," Vance replied. "Now we have to look ahead."

"Well, it's my spilt milk, as you say," Spiros declared, "and I want to clean it up myself. If all we need to do is take down Ramirez, I think I can get in there and maybe do it without too much in the way of pyrotechnics."

"What do you mean?" Armont asked.

"Let me go in by myself, alone. I've got a uniform, so I'll just be another Greek mechanic. At least we should try that first. See what I can do."

"Dimitri, that's a heroic offer," Armont said, "but-"

"No, it's not heroic, it's realistic. It's a chance, but one I think we should take."

"We don't stay in business by taking chances," Armont declared, vetoing him on the spot. "We go in as a team."

"All or nobody," Hans said. "It may not always be best, but those are the rules."

"Exactly." Armont closed out the subject. "All or nothing. So let's get out the blueprints and start assigning the entry-points."

"It's him," Alicia's voice came back over the intercom in the Oval Office. By now it looked as disheveled as the Situation Room in the basement.

"What?" Hansen said. "The son of a bitch is on the phone again? At this hour?"

"What do you want me to do?" she asked.

"Just a minute." He clicked off the intercom and returned to his other call. "Caroline, I don't know. Just play it by ear and do the best you can. Press Secretaries get paid for giving non-answers. Tell the goddamn Post we have no comment. Try and make a deal. Say you'll give their team an exclusive, deep background, just for them, if they'll hold off another few hours to give us time to sort this out. Tell him we promise not to give the Times anything fit to print until after their deadline tomorrow. The late edition." He paused. "You're probably right, but give it a shot anyway. Look, I've got to go."

He reached over and pushed a second button on the console.

"Yes."

"Mr. President," came the voice, its accent more pronounced now, "I know you think you can recover this facility with an assault, but I want to assure you that any such action would be a very costly mistake."

"The only mistake that's been made so far was made by you. Going there in the first place." Hansen glanced at the listing of his commitments for the next day. Ted would have to cancel all of them. This wasn't how the presidency was supposed to be. Nobody told him he would be spending days on end negotiating with a criminal threatening mass murder.

"Let me put it like this," the voice went on. "If there is an assault, all I have to do is retire to the lower level of the facility and then detonate one of the nuclear devices I now have armed. It's radio-controlled."

"If you want to commit suicide, then go ahead," Hansen said. What kind of bluff was that? he wondered.

"Let me put your mind at ease," came the voice, as measured and secure as it was foreboding. "My revolutionary colleagues and I will be at the main power coil, which is buried at least three hundred feet below the bedrock here. It is a ready-made bomb shelter. Any invading force, however, would be vaporized, along with all the civilians."

"You'd never escape," Hansen shot back. "What's the point?"

"That remains to be seen. But what you have to ask yourself is whether you are prepared to have a nuclear disaster in the Aegean."

On that point, Hansen admitted to himself, the son of a bitch had a point. The political costs, not to mention the economic costs, would be staggering.

"Look," he said, "you're proposing a scenario neither of us wants. It would be irresponsible and immoral. Though I suppose those points don't disturb you very much."

"Let me help your thought processes. You have twenty minutes, starting now. If at the end of that time you can't assure me that the assault has been called off-please don't bother to deny that one is imminent-then what will happen will be on your hands." He paused. "Incidentally, I also will bring Professor Mannheim to the phone then, and you can explain to him why he is about to die. I am putting this line on hold. You now have nineteen minutes and forty seconds." The phone went silent.

Hansen stared at Ed Briggs, sitting bleary-eyed across on the couch, then returned his gaze to the desk, noting the time on the digital clock.

"Alpha Leader, this is SEAL One," crackled the radio. "Bearing two-zero-niner. Range five hundred meters. No hostile fire."

"Roger," Nichols replied. "Continue inbound." He clicked off his walkie-talkie, then turned around and yelled to the men in the back of the Huey.

"Okay, heads up. The assault is now in progress. We go in at 0630 hours."

The Deltas nodded as they checked their watches and spare ammo clips. The twenty-three men were all wearing black pullover hoods, each with a thin plastic microphone that looked like a phone operator's. Over these they had Kevlar helmets with protective goggles and light balaclavas, while their bulletproof assault vests included pockets filled with grenades and extra ammo for their H amp;K MP5 assault submachine guns.

Nichols was using a squad of ten Navy SEALs to stage a diversionary assault on the shoreline, the same kind of diversion that had been employed so successfully by the SEALs in the war to liberate Kuwait. After leaving the carrier, they would approach the island at forty mph in a pair of Fountain-33 speedboats, powered by 1,000-hp MerCruiser engines. About one kilometer offshore, they were scheduled to disembark into two motorized Zodiac rubber raiding craft that they had lashed to the bow. If all went according to plan, they would hit the coastline in full view and provide diversionary fire, giving the real assault team an opening to take the two main objectives.

That's when the serious action would begin. Nichols and his men would then come in using Army choppers-two HH-1K Huey gunships and two AH-64A Apaches. The Hueys would hover and drop off the insertion teams, while the Apaches would provide backup firepower that-with their 30mm chain guns, Hellfire missiles, and 70mm folding-fin rocket pods-could easily be mistaken for the end of the world.